put in: Tuesday, Early Winter
hit: PLAY
1. Your English Is Good - Tokyo Police Club [Elephant Shell, 2008]
2. It's Not Over Yet - Klaxons [Myths of the Near Future, 2007]
3. Do Whatever You Do - Sheepy [JLAB, 2008]

Tuesday, December 4th

Tuesday, December the fourth felt like a Sunday, which was not a good way to start a school day even if it isn’t the day that you’re supposed to start a social experiment.

Which may seem just hilarious to some people, but those would be the people who like Sundays and social experiments. And while I’ve never met a person like that, I’m sure they’re really messed up to live a life like that. I don’t know how they can stand themselves or make it through the weekend without staying in their rooms.

But I guess they do, or else Sundays and social experiments would have died out long ago.

As it turns out, they haven’t.

I parked my car carefully, which is something that a lot of people don’t do even though they really should, and got out.

Even though it is essentially against my principles, I had worn my favorite clothes. Which would possibly turn into a Grand Mistake since it did feel a lot like a Sunday and I was going to school. And there was a great possibility of telling someone that their shoes were mangy and they would just turn around and say “Oh yeah? So how long have you had those Chuck Taylors, huh, little punk? They’re like mange personified.”

And there isn’t much a person can say to that, even if it’s a load of crap and they’re pretty sure that the person who said it to them doesn’t know what “mange” or “personified” means.

I tried to sit down at my desk looking like I had a positive attitude.

Which I sort of did, since I did think that I looked fairly nice in my favorite jeans. I think that maybe only girls usually have favorite jeans because they make them look good, but there’s nothing really wrong with that, in my opinion, so I think I should be allowed to have a favorite pair as well.

“Hi,” I said to the guy who sits in front of me. I don’t know what his name is since he never raises his hand in class to be called on, but I felt like saying hi so I had to.

“Hello,” he mumbled. He didn’t look at me full on, but I did see him looking out of the corner of his eye. “So you’re Nicholas.”

He said this like he had been expecting me and I’d never shown up, all school year, until right that second, on that Tuesday in December as if I would ever be caught going to school until December. That is a complete and utter joke, actually.

I laughed a little. “Yeah, I am.”

“So I saw that you went to that concert. That Christmas one or whatever?”

“Oh,” I said. So it was still that time of year. “Yeah. Yeah, I did. Brilliant.”

He nodded sagely and drummed a little with his thumbs on the desk. “So.” He drew it out into about ten syllables. “What’s your experiment, then?” He grinned.

“Oh.” It occurred to me then that maybe people don’t talk to me because I say ‘oh’ a lot, which is really silly of them because it’s not like it’s that annoying. “I’m going to see how people react if you tell them exactly what you want to say. Like, uh, that you hate their shirt or something. You know?” I asked, hoping he would tell me what a good idea it was. Then I would at least know it wasn’t stupid and that I was getting punched out for something stupid.

“Sounds good,” he said, “sounds good. Yeah, that’s perfect.”

The bell rang.

I still didn’t know his name by the time it rang again fifty minutes later and I jumped out of my seat and out the door.

I didn’t talk to anyone else all that first day of the experiment, which made it a little hard to collect data. Then again, it was maybe partially my fault since I didn’t tell Miranda not to put the gum under the table and then I never told her not to put it back in her mouth, either.

The thing is, Tuesdays are half-days, so that also made it a little hard. The upside was that on half-days I always go to the mall and buy some new music since I get a weekly allowance on top of whatever I make at the record store for myself. Which means that I can maybe buy one CD a week and still be able to save up for clothes and concerts.

I thought about the fact, every once in a while, that I could maybe soley support the music industry. If I was the only one who bought music, all terrible bands would go broke and down the tubes. I would only have good music to choose from.

Which was sort of a dream of mine. To just walk into a store and have it all out there and know that I could pick up any CD I wanted to and it would be one of the best things I’d ever heard.

But life isn’t really like that, which is why mix CDs are maybe some of the best things ever because you know that whoever made it has only put on good music (because people who listen to crap don’t bother to make mixes because they obviously aren’t creative enough) and whichever track you skip to will be ace.

Like sometimes I wish people were like that. That you could talk to any of them and they would think you were great and they would be great.

But instead we’re all stuck at high school in the years of our lives when we are really nearly at our peak and the people we’re surrounded with are Rugby Players and Prom Queens and Stoners and if they’re thinking about you, you’d better work harder not to be noticed.

And since that’s the logic I basically live by most of the time, my social experiment was really going to end up doing me in. Because telling a Prom Queen she looks a little too slutty for December, and did she even know it was December because usually people don’t wear skirts that short in summer, much less winter?

Yeah, that’s not how you stay out of sight. If those are your plans, you’re not very smart, in my opinion.

“Hey, it’s our Tuesday Man!” the clerk said as I walked in, the bell on the door tinkling a little as it shut behind me.

“Yep.” I smiled. I liked being their only real regular there – just like I had been for the last three years.

“So,” the clerk said, coming up behind me as I looked at the new display case, “what do you think, huh?”

To be honest, the display was terrible. First of all, no music store should ever have a display of Britney Spears and be proud of it. I suppose if they have to have one, it should at least be despised by everyone who happens to see it out of the corner of their eye, much less work in sight of it.

“Yeah, uh.” I caught myself.

Social experiment, Nick. SOCIAL EXPERIMENT! I thought angrily.

“Yeah, that’s actually kind of disgusting. I mean, maybe some people like her, but on display? Who are you kidding? She shaved her head, man. No one wants music by that thing.” I shook my head in disgust. “If you really want to get some attention in here, you might want a display of something no one’s ever heard of. You know, to intrigue them or whatever. No one is intrigued by Britney Spears. They are just scared of her.”

“Ah,” he said, already walking back to the counter.

I must say that as a real nearly-breakthrough in the Social Experiment, that was a fairly nice start. He didn’t even smile at me when he rang up the CD.

Although I did hear him whisper “music snob” when he put it in a bag.

“Thank you!” I said cheerfully.

“Uh huh. See you next week, kid.”

The last bit was quite loaded with assumptions of my age, but coming from a thirty-something who likes Britney Spears, I decided that it would be a waste of time to care.

Three days before, which was Saturday, I had run into someone I knew went to my school when I was working at the record store.

She’s in my lunch period and I am pretty sure that her locker is somewhere in the vicinity of mine since I have heard, on occasion, people telling her that they are jealous of her locker.

Like, I guess they really want a locker in the busiest part of the school or something.

She bought maybe two albums of Led Zeppelin, which I think is terrible taste and then the new Death Cab in vinyl which even I didn’t do. I hold to the belief that the Zeppelin was a gift for her mother or something.

Since I happened to be working the register right when she was checking out, I was obligated to make some snarky record store comments about her purchases. My comments generally aren’t snarky because if I think someone is buying absolute trash, I’m not exactly allowed to tell them. And I’m not very in to memorizing the members of bands that no one cares about anymore (you know, now that the fifties are over with and Jagger is pretty gross) and their star signs and what sorts of equipment they used back in the Golden Age or anything. So I just told her that I’m a big fan of Ben Gibbard and she gave me a look like “Who is Ben Gibbard and why do I care?” which made me think that maybe the Zeppelin was for her and the Death Cab was for her mother?

And I sort of blushed and didn’t say anything else.

I mean, maybe she was just shy about her own liking of Ben Gibbard and just didn’t want to talk about it with some weird guy at a record store.

Which is slightly plausible, since she was buying the thing in vinyl.

And now, three days later, I was visiting the record store to get my pay check, because they never pay me when I’m actually supposed to be there because I guess that’s inconvenient for them or something, but is probably just because Martin likes to make me mad, and she was in there again.

So instead of going right to the back and getting my check like I usually do, because I’m not very interested in hanging around people who ask how big seven inches is, I sort of followed her from the other side of the rack.

She thumbed through the cases gently and scrunched up her nose when dust flew in her face, like she didn’t even want to sneeze on them because that sort of moisture could just ruin the things (which it wouldn’t, I’m pretty sure, but whatever). She would sometimes pull one out and just look at the cover for a really long time, and then read all the tracks listed and then look at the cover again. Like she needed to see it twice to realize that, yeah, records do have really nice art.

I was pretending to look at some old Beatles albums, even though I really don’t like the Beatles, when she must have recognized me.

“Hey,” she said. “You work here, right?”

“Sorry, this is my day off.” I didn’t look up from the White Album, even though it really isn’t much to look at.

“Yeah, sorry, but do you know when this was produced? It doesn’t say.”

“Check the record. I don’t memorize crap like that.” Did I really just say that? I thought. Oh yes, Nick. You just insulted that girl. After you were the one following her around like a complete freak.

“Ooooh-kay then.” She put the record back in its sleeve and nestled it back between two others in the rack.

“What? So you’re not going to buy it because you don’t know when that exact record was made? Can you not just look it up on Wikipedia?”

“It’s one thing to know when it’s released and another to know when it was made,” she said, like it was obviously important for everyone to know.

“So you want to know exactly when that record came off a line of… records being created? Do you want to throw it a birthday party or something? Like, I can assure that it won’t mind if you don’t.”

“Not the record, the music,” she clarified.

“Wikipedia!” I shouted again. “I bet they’ll let you use the computer in here if it’s a sale or no sale situation. Martin’s greedy like that.”

“Don’t you go to my school or something?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I lied. “I don’t know who you are, so I couldn’t say.”

“You’re Nick Dunhorn, aren’t you?” she said, giving me a funny look.

“Uh, yes. That’s me. Uh, why?”

“That was real jerk-off thing to do, you know. To Clarissa Meyers? You know her boyfriend broke up with her over that after school, huh?” She was glaring at me.

To be honest, I still don’t know who Clarissa Meyers is.

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” I said calmly, putting the White Album away.

“That stuff you wrote all over the front hall?! My God, and you’re just all nonchalant about it, huh? Screw you and your posh little record store. That CD place across the way is just as nice.”

I didn’t really know what it was all about, but I did feel the need to call after her, “You know they have a huge Britney Spears display there! I wouldn’t go in if I were you! Contamination and that sort of thing!”

“Oh, just shut up, huh?!”

Martin decided not to deduct anything from my pay check even though he was sort of miffed that I’d screwed over a customer that he really wanted. (I guess he had seen her wallet and it was bursting. So it seems that I wasn’t the only one watching her.)

When I finally got home and logged onto my computer, there were about ten million more emails than I usually have. Most of them were about three words long and not the nicest thing I’d ever received.

I didn’t really know what had happened and why I was being blamed for it, but I seemed to be the prime suspect in something. I’d have to wait for school the next day to figure it out.

Overall, I was pretty happy about the way my experiment was going so far, even if other people weren’t.

I worked on a few new playlists before taking a shower.

I don’t really like showers, but they’re a whole lot faster than baths and whole lot cleaner, if you ask me. Like, if you’re really dirty enough to need a shower, or anything, then why would you want a bath? You’d just have to sit in all this dirty water, like you’re marinating in it or something. It’s disgusting, and so every time I think of baths I just think of chicken in the refrigerator in teriyaki sauce, getting all flavored-up for grilling or something. It’s absolutely gross.

I also am not a huge fan of mirrors in bathrooms, since I would really rather not look at my skinny stomach and chest area once per day. Maybe if I only had to wash, say, once a year, I could take it. Unfortunately, puberty crushed those dreams for good. Plus, going to concerts as much as I do and not washing would not be a good combination.

I took off my glasses and set them carefully on the bathroom counter.

I don’t really need the glasses very much, besides for reading, but I wear them all the time anyways. It’s pointless, I think, so spend time taking them on and off when there are things to read everywhere you ever go.

I stripped down and tried not to look in the mirror. I turned the water on high and didn’t even wait for it to warm up before jumping in. People who wait for the water to warm up don’t know how nice it is to be in a freezing cold shower for a few seconds before the hot bit of “hot shower” kicks in.

Like, if you ever even did that just once in your life, you’d never go back to waiting for the water to warm up. It’s just that good.

The weird thing about my shower that night was that I almost fell asleep and then accidentally washed my hair twice. I hadn’t really been planning on washing my hair even once, because you really only need to wash your hair once every two days, but I ended up washing it once before I nearly fell asleep and then once afterwards since I didn’t really remember having done it the time before.

I am sometimes known to sing in the shower. Mum told me that when I was little (and still took baths) that I sang all the time, in the bath or not. She always thought I’d join choir when I was old enough.

Most of the things mum thought about me were pretty weird and never ended up happening because no one in their right mind growing up these days would ever even consider doing them. And I’d like to think that I am of pretty sound mind most of the time, so I didn’t ever join choir.

Besides, once puberty hits, no one wants the boys in choir anyways.

Boys after puberty are only good for garage bands, and since I don’t have anyone else to be in my band, it’s sort of tedious to work on since I’m not very interested in the bass, and therefore even though I can play it fairly well, I’d rather have someone else do it for me instead of having to record it until it’s just right for an entire afternoon only to move onto drums, which I’m really bad at, but I have to do it anyways.

But in essence, that’s all that boys after puberty are good for until they’re maybe around thirty. Because by that time I’d hope they wouldn’t be boys.

And even before puberty I’d had my inhibitions about joining choir, so that was that. Shower singing was all mum would get from me once I was seven and wise enough to know that boys don’t sing.

I mean, obviously they do. I know that now or else I would listen to complete trash, but when you’re seven it’s a black and white world out there.

Which I never even really thought was right when I was seven and I’ll be seventeen in about eight months and I still think it’s completely messed up that people dress their babies in “boy” colors and “girl” colors like they’re so afraid of the world that they have to hide behind all the crap everyone knows will come at them or else they’ll be hit by something they weren’t expecting. And parents don’t like surprises, which is why I always tried to keep mine to a minimum. I mean, it’s not like someone’s going to faint when their kid says he doesn’t want to join the choir. It’s not the end of the world.

Like, they all just say “alright now, son, run along and go punch something” and everything is okay.

Not that I ever went around punching things or something. Even though that sounds like it might be sort of a good idea sometimes, but it probably wouldn’t work out too well for me and I’d end up regretting it.

I mean, it’s not like there’s karma or something, but there is really bad luck and I know that I have it or else why would people blame me for the break up of some couple I didn’t even know about? Like, why would they run out of a record store just because I told them I don’t care when the Beatles or somebody was in a recording studio singing “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”?

I mean, who cares about the Beatles anyhow? No one goes around in Beatles shirts anymore unless they’re trying to convince people that they are brilliantly cool or something, which is obviously not true since they appear to like the Beatles.

I didn’t sing anything that night in the shower because I had about ten different songs stuck in my head and running together, and there was too much else to think about besides the songs and all that.

So I kind of just finished washing my hair for the second time, scrubbed my stomach half-heartedly and dried off as fast as I could so I could go to bed.

I realized in the morning that this was an absolutely terrible decision because it just made the morning come faster.